Shareware awards just a scam? MacUpdate, Versiontracker and IUseThis.com vs the Windows world

We buy and use a lot of software here at Foliovision. We have all kinds of weird stuff running for checking web rankings and logging backlinks in our SEO business. We don’t like Adobe much for price gouging so we buy all kinds of graphics bits and bobs to

Basically our rule is that if a software program can do it faster, then have a software program do it. This approach allows us to offer our clients more service within their budget. So we have contact with a lot of software. While out shopping online (how’s that for a pleonasm) I’ve often seen sterling awards pages for what looks like really rubbish programming.

inventory builder bogus software awards

Where do these ugly little banners come from and how the software developers earn them?

It turns out just by submitting software. No, you say, impossible. Somebody’s looked at the software. No, no one has ever looked at the software.

bogus software submission screenshot

Andy’s fake app was approved and listed on 218 software directories. Incredible. Even more shocking, he won 16 awards. Sixteen 5 star awards would be enough to give even the worst piece of malware a veneer of respectability.

So what is a shareware purchaser to do?

Buy a Mac. In the Mac universe, there are only three software download sites of any import with VersionTracker.com and Macupdate.com battling for top dog for the last three years, with IUseThis.com trailing.

The ratings and comments on all three are legitimate and minimally censored in favour of the developers. Even I’m aghast at some of the things I read on Macupdate in particular (Nate, for the most part, please keep them up, following the profiles of some of these curmudgeons is incredibly entertaining and keeps people coming back to Macupdate).

The sites are not perfect. One developer had friends inside Macupdate whom he tried to use to censor commentary (Misha, I believe). In the end, after some comments being pulled and the tempest in a teapot rising higher Nate finally intervened and put the review back online and warned off the developer.

In any case, these three sites don’t hand out prizes. They allow developers to display user ratings badges on their sites like this:

If a developer posts an incorrect Versiontracker or MacUpdate badge he or she will be asked to pull the badge down immediately. In any case, it is standard practice for the badge to link directly to the developer’s site. If a developer encourages sock puppet votes he’s blacklisted. Unfortunately the list is only three developers long, so I’m not inclined to believe it’s complete. On the other hand, perhaps Nate and team have caught and warned 200 developers but it didn’t get to blacklist levels.

A couple of years ago, I had the feeling MacUpdate might become a bit smug as VersionTracker atrophied. IUseThis.com came along just in time and made MacUpdate pay more attention to the convenience of users of the site first. What kind of nuisance am I talking about? There was a period of six months where it was impossible to search MacUpdate from outside the site – you had to load their overly busy, distracting home page to do so. Finally they quit that about a year ago.

So in the Mac universe there are just three sites of any import. On any of them fake feedback is likely to be called quickly. There are no fake awards. If a Mac user sees any other award badges, s/he will ignore those banners.

Straightforward access to high quality shareware is another reason I decided to take Foliovision Mac-centric at the end of 2009. Previously we had only had one and then two Mac users in the company. Now we have moved to fifty-fifty. We do have some very bad copycat developers like Koingo Software (from beautiful BC just like me) who hawk their second class wares everywhere, but you can usually suss them out pretty quickly.

It would be nice if CNET would pull about three quarters of the javascript and half the ads off of Versiontracker so we could go back to a two horse race. I’m not quite sure what ails IUseThis.com but at least they are there as an insurance policy if MacUpdate starts to go off the same overly monetized rails as Versiontracker. But all in all, as Mac users we are quite fortunate in our developers and our shareware sites.

Alec has been helping businesses succeed online since 2000. Alec is an SEM expert with a background in advertising, as a former Head of Television for Grey Moscow and Senior Television Producer for Bates, Saatchi and Saatchi Russia.

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Hi Alec, thanks for the favorable comments about MacUpdate. If my memory serves me correctly, when we blocked searches performed outside of the site, I believe it was part of a process to (1) reduce server load for fake queries, (2) block wares apps from querying the site and lifting content from our pages. It took a bit to re-build our search so it was more efficient and way better than any other Mac software search (search for iTunes on VT and it’s not even on the first page of search results — MU has it as the first listing) and make it efficient for our servers.

Overall, I don’t think you need to worry about MacUpdate not improving because of competition falling behind. We have so many ideas to improve services for users, and help developers promote their software. A good example of this is the newly released MacUpdate Desktop. Check it out:

Thanks for stopping by. Great to hear that you have more improvements underway!

I did notice that the search results are quite good. I’d like it to be easier and more intuitive to do a search including both terms, i.e. I think the rankings should be heavily weighted to items including all terms. Right now if you use two terms, one which is common and the other which is rare the results are too long at 12 pages and heavily weighted to items which are only iTunes related. In fact I think the first search should include only items which include both terms with an offer for a subsequent search for items with either term.

I’m not sure I’d trust MacUpdate on my desktop yet, given my experience of being shut out with searches not from the home page and having a moderator initially delete feedback as a personal favour to a developer friend. On the other hand, recently MacUpdate did promptly provide me and another user with the 700 MB disk image from a bundle (after the software owner took it down). That encouraged a lot more trust.

What is really bothering me about your desktop application is that you have removed AppFresh from the MacUpdate database. I’ve tried AppFresh and will not likely run it often (I have enough software that I don’t really want to bother updating it all all the time). But AppFresh is really good.

Kicking them out of your database is dishonest and underhanded. The fundamental social contract of MacUpdate is to provide free access to all non-malware Mac apps. By excluding a nominal competitor, you become a dishonest broker. Of course a single application is not the end of the world. But it’s the thin edge of the wedge. If you can do that to Metaquark, who will you do it to next? How can I as a user be sure which developers have been included and which have been excluded.

You allow some real crap in your database and to exclude Fresh is quite simply low. As long as AppFresh is not in your app database (if you wait six months to kill the AppFresh first through lack of exposure that doesn’t count), I will neither try MacUpdate Desktop, nor pay for it, nor consider a paid subscription to MacUpdate. You get enough of my money from MuPromos and MacUpdate Bundles that I’m already underwriting your unfair dealings with Metaquark.

I hope you rethink this policy promptly. This is the sort of behaviour I’d expect from Microsoft and not a central hub of the Mac community.

We never listed AppFresh is our database, nor have we listed VT Pro. The same is for VT’s site, or any other site that has a base competing product. MacUpdate isn’t a place were all software is promoted. It’s like the iTunes App Store — tons of stuff doesn’t make it every day. It’s not dishonest. Companies shouldn’t be required to promote their competition within their own walls. And of course, it’s not fair for me to say that you can’t choose not to try MacUpdate Desktop. That’s your choice.

MacUpdate is not just a website. We’re not even a company that is limited to only focus on Mac software (we do TONS of things in our local communities and our non-Mac work is not publicized because our motives are not founded on getting positive public recognition).

MacUpdate has been a website since 1996, and we’ve also been developing software (some free and some shareware) for longer than the foliovision.com domain name has existed. To say that MacUpdate isn’t allowed to develop software seems like a very controlling statement. And to say that MacUpdate is dishonest because we don’t actively promote directly competing software with a main revenue source that keeps our free macupdate.com site alive makes no sense, nor is it very encouraging to hear.

We develop MacUpdate Desktop because it fits perfectly with helping us keep peoples’ Mac software updated. And we make it a $20 shareware app because it costs us a ton of money to develop, hire people to keep our database the most accurate, and keep our servers and bandwidth paid for. MacUpdate Desktop is the backbone of MacUpdate in the same way the iPod and iTunes have become backbones for Apple. If Apple was required to sell the Zune in their stores or promote Microsoft Media Player on their website, that’s just not fair. Any company that is forced to promote direct competition of products that are the financial backbone of the organization is something that will likely never be supported in a free market.

MacUpdate has very little ads cluttering the site, and any user can create a free MacUpdate member account and choose to hide all of the paid ads — at no cost.

We allow free hosting off developers’ files on our servers and bandwidth — at no cost to the developer (freeware has no obligation. shareware we ask them to link to MU’s page on their site so it can remain free for the devs).

MacUpdate goes out of our way to be honest with people, to be the most accurate and timely resource, to give people tools to keep their Mac updated better than anything that’s ever been available, and we help developers promote their software on MacUpdate free of charge. It saddens me to see people try to limit organizations, by putting them in boxes, trying to define what they are and aren’t (especially as an outsider) and trying to force their will on others, as if that is a positive method to use. Typically this is poor form, and forcing people to do things often won’t result in people getting what they really want.

Interesting article. That is scary that the non-app could win so many “awards.” I’ve never paid too much attention to them and I’ve been wary of developers/sites that put too much faith in them: your software should be good because it’s good – not because someone who makes cute little web badges says its good.

I find your comments at odds with the article though – you chastise the Windows world for listing everything – and then get mad at MacUpdate for not listing everything. Then too you say an app developer shouldn’t be able to run a site that lists software?

Who put you in charge of the universe?

If I ran MU or VT I wouldn’t list my competitors’ products either. I don’t expect Bing to give me Google results and I don’t expect Burger King to sell me a Big Mac.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was a software listing site that a) listed everything in the world and b) had the storage and bandwidth to keep every version ever produced?

I must say I don’t visit the update sites that often. I am so sick and tired of every app that I run reminding me (often at the worst possible moment or when I need something done quickly) that a new version is available. Yes I know I can turn off updating in prefs – but when I do decide to update those prefs usually get overwritten.

I think it has made developers very lazy and versions get put out long before they would have in the “old days.” I’ll go back to my porch now…

MacUpdate goes out of our way to be honest with people, to be the most accurate and timely resource, to give people tools to keep their Mac updated better than anything that’s ever been available, and we help developers promote their software on MacUpdate free of charge.

Most of that is true. Then why break your own clear mandate to try to kill someone else’s shareware application?

If you like, outcompete AppFresh by making MacUpdate Desktop better. But don’t abuse your position as arbitrar of the Mac shareware world. Or you might not compete very long.

You have lots of other revenue sources. Your bundles and your daily MuPromos. The way you’ve separated MuPromo from the main site and only advertised it on your own property keeps a healthy separation of church and state. That is not the case with barring applications which compete with those of you or your friends (Misha tried to protect his friend Tim Breslin’s TastyApps revenue by deleting comments about Tim’s software and customer service).

Where do you draw the line Joel?

At what point is a successful competing application judged a thread and eliminated from your database? If it’s yours, if it’s a friend’s, if someone pays you to do so. Where is that line, Joel?

That you are “developing software (some free and some shareware)” just makes your position as arbitrar of the MacUpdate database that much more untenable.

Had you been clever about it you could have coopted AppFresh by making some part of its functionality dependent on people having MacUpdate paid memberships, instead of banning it.

In terms of other companies behaving as badly as you are, I recommend you go and use Google right now. Look up “pay per click”. Among related searches, they show: “yahoo pay per click”. Look up “video sharing site” and wikipedia and metatube come in places one to three. Not YouTube.

Google does promote their own properties. But they don’t exclude other people’s properties. Yes, perhaps Bing would do something like that. But there’s a reason Microsoft is struggling and Google is thriving. And you Joel are on the wrong side of modern business philosophy.

Coming closer to home, Apple does publicise Windows and VMWare and Bootcamp right in their own store and all over their website.

What’s worse, barrring apps from MacUpdate just because you want that part of the shareware market is just the wrong thing to do. It’s a pity that you can’t see it. You have other revenue sources. Take a stand on principle, not short term revenues.

Don’t be so greedy. Your place in the sun is based entirely on trust and on your ethical standing. When MacFixIt did so, Versiontracker was replaced in a few years by MacUpdate. Learn from history and don’t abuse your position.

Neither MacUpdate nor Versiontracker store most of the software on their own servers. For the most part, they are only serving a link to the software on the developer’s own server.

MacUpdate is a shareware listing service which purports to be open and inclusive (excluding only out and out illegal software and malware: go and check, all the DVD ripping software – a borderline case – is listed there).

In terms of application updates, I thoroughly agree with you. I’ve disabled automated version checking in most of my apps. In those that don’t let me turn it off, I’ve barred them from phoning home forever with Little Snitch. These constant microreleases are a huge burden on the user with more than ten apps.

I’m not master of the universe but I will call out a clear conflict of interest and bad behaviour when I see it.

I’ve used VersionTracker (AND MacFixIt) for years and ever since CNET took over it’s gone way, way down hill. MacFixIt is now a pitiful joke compared to what it once was..

I still use VT, but now use MacUpdate much more. It has far many more software listings everyday than VT.

Also, if the Flash and ads irritate you, do what I did…Install Click4Flash and Safari AdBlocker. Now I can opt to run Flash frames on web sites and see NO ads! Both are free and make web surfing faster and more pleasurable.

What is really bothering me about your desktop application is that you have removed AppFresh from the MacUpdate database.

Worse: try searching for “AppFresh” on MacUpdate. It will redirect you to, surprise surprise, MacUpdate Desktop page. A new low that promptly discouraged me from subscribing to MU Desktop (at $20 A YEAR it’s pretty expensive, but I hoped it would find updates better than AppFresh, which doesn’t do a particularly good job).

I agree that MacUpdate is being totally sleazy and unethical in REDIRECTING searches for AppFresh to MacUpdate Desktop. I certainly will not be giving any more business to such scumbags.

This reprehensible and unethical behavior has caused a number of MacUpdate users to leave unfavorable comments on the listing. But, surprise, surprise, such comments mysteriously disappear from the site. I’ve read numerous other reports of comments and user accounts disappearing throughout the MacUpdate site. Censorship is apparently very common on the site. I’ve verified this in a number of cases, where the pre-censored information is still available in various external caches. (I now keep my own archives just to see how blatant and rampant this behavior is.)

There are a number of other apps that MacUpdate intentionally leaves out of their directory because they do not like them — rather then letting users make their own determinations. They seem to take the attitude that listing a program is equivalent to “promoting” it. The reality is far from it. I tend to use reviews more to help me steer clear the loser apps rather than to guide me to the winners. By leaving “bad” apps out of their database, they miss the opportunity for users to warn other users away from them, and they undermine not only their own claims of completeness, but also the very functionality of MacUpdate Desktop!

They certainly don’t believe in transparency over at MacUpdate, that’s for sure. I no longer believe in them. I do respect their right to try to make a buck, but the way they are going about it has cost them my respect and business and, I imagine, that of many others as well.

Misha with MacUpdate here… I just came across this page today for the first time and wanted to respond to the most recent 2 comments.

First, AppFresh redirects to MacUpdate Desktop because the term “AppFresh” is mentioned countless times in the reviews section of MacUpdate Desktop. We have allowed our members and critics to debate whether we should or shouldn’t list AppFresh without censoring them whatsoever. We don’t mind having that conversation, which should already be clear by Joel’s previous engagement in this discussion.

Also, it should be noted that another reason we don’t list AppFresh is because it’s very much an inferior product to MacUpdate Desktop and we don’t want to risk confusing our users. IUseThis is a very nice site but it’s not nearly as up-to-date as MacUpdate. AppFresh’s ability to accurately match applications is also very sub-par to MacUpdate (to be fair, I haven’t tried the build they released earlier this month — but AppFresh wasn’t updated for almost 2 years). Last time I tried AppFresh it accurately matched less than half the apps on my Mac, didn’t match about a quarter of them at all, and incorrectly matched about a quarter of them (meaning if I tried updating app X with AppFresh, it actually downloaded and installed app Y). MacUpdate serves about 7 million unique visits a month; only a minority of our traffic are “MacUpdate power users” who I’d expect would be able to easily tell that AppFresh is not affiliated with MacUpdate. You’d be amazed how many emails we get from people asking for technical support or refunds for apps that we list on MacUpdate and don’t develop because those users don’t understand that we’re not the developer or that they didn’t actually pay us for the app. As MacUpdate Desktop represents not an insignificant amount of revenue for us, we can’t risk tarnishing our reputation by promoting a similar and inferior product (many people might think AppFresh is the ‘free’ version of MacUpdate Desktop, and upon being unhappy with it won’t see the point in checking out the ‘paid for’ MacUpdate Desktop, for instance).

Second, we don’t censor anything except for abusive or highly irrelevant posts. “Cheesed Off” makes a lot of claims and purports to have evidence based on saved caches that I invite him to post for others to scrutinize. Apart from AppFresh and VersionTracker Pro, generally speaking the only apps we don’t list on MacUpdate are those that violate GPL license terms. Simply put (as an example), this includes the dozens of “DVD ripper”, “iPhone media encoder”, “iPod ripper”, and similar apps that are sold by a number of Russian and Chinese firms selling clones of the same app that all leverage the free ffmpeg code (or other open-source, GPL libraries). It’s not a matter of us “not liking” those apps, it’s a matter of not encouraging the active theft of code.

If you ever discover we’re missing an app in our database, email us and we’ll get it posted straight away (or at least explain why it’s not listed). updates (at) macupdate [dot] com.

Thanks for stopping by. Unfortunately in my testing I preferred AppFresh to MacUpdate Desktop. Cheesed Off is right.

MacUpdate used a position of power to push a superior competitor out of the market. It’s dirty pool.

Not to mention the time I made the mistake of gifting some applications and you took the occasion to start spamming my recipients on a daily basis (I had turned off daily mailings).

MacUpdate ethics are pretty shaky. And yes I buy a lot less from you because of it and will never gift another app. That little spam stunt cost you hundreds of dollars of sales per year as I would like to gift apps.

Moreover, as you’ve run short of good applications whose owners want to promote them for your daily special, the application selection standards have dropped through the floor, including exactly the kind of me-too GPL wrapper apps which you quite right take to task in your post above.

Hi Alec– if you can provide specifics on how AppFresh is better than MacUpdate Desktop, we’d love to hear the feedback. We checked out the newest version to a limited extent and still found it lacking (multiple apps were reported as being “updated” when nothing had actually changed). Of course, you’re free to choose and prefer AppFresh, but I think I went into enough detail regarding why we don’t list AppFresh on our site (and you’re free to disagree with our reasoning, too).

Regarding the gifting and MUPromo emails — that’s the sort of good feedback I’m talking about. I actually hadn’t realized that when you gift an app to a member not in our database that they’re automatically being subscribed to our daily offers. We’ll investigate this and adjust accordingly. It should be noted that email preferences, including unsubscribing, are provided at the bottom of every offer email we send. We have no interest in spamming anyone who has no interest in our offers (the same thing goes behind ads on our site — we let anyone disable them if they want, even free accounts, because we have no interest in showing you ads if you never want to see them).

Regarding the quality of apps on MUPromo, there will of course be fluctuation there since we run roughly 300 apps a year (can you name 300 non-free apps that you would want to buy?), especially since what’s useless to one person can be useful to others. It’s news to me that we’ve ran any me-too GPL’d apps ever, though, so please point out when we have done that. Since our revenue is directly tied to the quality of apps we sell, we have no interest in selling sub-par apps. I’ll also add that MUPromo’s traffic and sales continue to grow by leaps and bounds, as does traffic to MacUpdate itself.

Feel free to email me directly to discuss any of this (it might be more productive that way): misha@

From my experience, AppFresh respects my privacy, only checking for updates and not keeping an online database of all my purchased and installed applications.

I’m not running either of the applications now as you killed AppFresh by delisting them and not allowing them to use your listings and I find MacUpdate Desktop a huge privacy nightmare (actually how can I delete my own online file with you).

Regarding gifting, if I gift an application I want to gift the application from me and not get my recipient involved in MLM marketing. What you are doing with gifting is extremely bad manners and has left a permanent bad taste in my mouth.

Now that I’ve had lots of negative things to say about MacUpdate, I will say one good thing. For the large downloads and keeping track of our purchases and making sure they stay available to us, you’ve been very reliable. Keep up the good work in that direction.

Where did you get the idea that MacUpdate is keeping track of all your purchased or installed apps? We keep track of your purchases through MUPromo, of course, but that’s more for our customer’s own reference than anything else (we don’t share that data, nor do we ever share or sell any customer data) and it’s a common practice among any online retailers. MacUpdate Desktop does not log what apps a member has installed and communicates anonymously with our server once to compare installed versions against our database. If this matter of privacy is the only reason you preferred AppFresh, I’m afraid your reasoning isn’t quite accurate and that AppFresh is guilty of the exact same.

I’m also not sure I would consider enrolling a giftee in our mailing list a form of MLM marketing, especially since we offer and respect any opt-out requests and only market our offers to them. But I won’t argue semantics with you — if you think we’re being shady by not letting AppFresh leverage our database freely (which we pay and employ 4 full-time people to maintain in addition to nearly $10K/month in servers and bandwidth to support our infrastructure), if you think MacUpdate Desktop having to communicate with our servers to accomplish its job is a privacy violation, and if you think our MUPromo mailing list is MLM marketing, you’re totally entitled to those views.

To clarify about AppFresh redirecting to MacUpdate Desktop: the default behavior of our search engine is that if there’s only 1 result, it takes you to that result (vs. presenting you with a list with one result). I just realized that may not have been clear previously. If another listing had as many comments that mentioned AppFresh, searching for AppFresh would show both listings for results when you run a search, rather than automatically forwarding you to MacUpdate Desktop.

You can test this yourself, by searching for a unique term like devonnote:

Of course I’m not concerned about you keeping a record of applications which I’ve purchased that’s in order.

On the privacy issue, I do not and will not use the Apple store. I’m considering migrating our whole company away from Macs as a consequence of Apple’s insane new lack of privacy. But that’s a separate and a long topic.

For AppFresh, not allowing them to use your database I can see. Refusing to list them in your database and redirecting searches for AppFresh to MacUpdate Desktop is just dirty pool. Honestly, I buy a lot less from MacUpdate as a consequence of that and my experience with spamming gift recipients.

In terms of gifting, when I gift an app I do not expect to be signing up my friends, families and colleagues to opt-out marketing. And as a matter of fact you are violating the law by so doing.

Based on spamming gift recipients and refusing to list AppFresh, I haven’t seen much compunction from your crew about violating the law or fair play.

I don’t disagree with your perspectives on privacy, but you failed to explain where you got this idea that MacUpdate is in any way logging or storing information about your apps or purchases (beyond MUPromo) when using MacUpdate Desktop. That concerns me beyond being factually incorrect because we certainly don’t want to project that notion, but some how managed to in your case—and I want to address whatever source that came from so that more people aren’t mistaken.

Regarding AppFresh not being listed, I went into some detail about that insofar as not wanting to confuse or tarnish our brand by people mistaking it for a MacUpdate product, especially when we have one that competes with it. You’re free to continue to disagree with that perspective, but I don’t think we owe anyone an apology for not wanting to promote anything that could jeopardize our business (because MacUpdate at the end of the day is a business, with about 10 employees who support their families on the salary they earn… we’re not a bunch of college kids just playing around with a side project).

If AppFresh was as good of an app as MacUpdate Desktop this might be different, but the database it leverages is not as up-to-date as ours and its matching ability is also inferior. It’s extremely difficult to build an app like MacUpdate Desktop—there are literally dozens of different versioning and naming conventions that need to be properly accounted for and accurately matching all of them is very tricky. It’s easy to build an 80% solution, which is what I view AppFresh as being. It’s really hard to build a 99.9% solution, and it’s really terrible when someone goes to update an app and the app they were trying to update is deleted and replaced by an unrelated app (or simply not updated at all). I also already explained that AppFresh redirects to MacUpdate Desktop because of the number of times it’s mentioned in the comments section of MacUpdate Desktop. I suppose we could delete all the discussion about AppFresh in the listing to correct this, but then we’d be guilty of not just not listing AppFresh, but of censoring any discussion about it. I have a feeling in your eyes this would be even worse (it would be in mine, at least).

Regarding gifting, if you could cite the law that we’re breaking I’m interested simply from a technical perspective. I already acknowledged that in terms of best-practices if we’re signing up recipients for our list we really shouldn’t be doing that but instead offering them the option to sign up. But as I mentioned, this wasn’t done deliberately or for any nefarious purposes, it has to do with default settings in our database and how gifting is handled. Gifting is something we added to the system years after launching MUPromo, and feedback like this is important for us to refine and improve it since we hadn’t realize it. Honestly, you’re the first person to ever even point this out to us, let alone voice disapproval of it—perhaps others have thought the same thing, but simply clicked the opt-out link in the email and didn’t really think enough about it to let us know (neither did you, apparently, until months or years later via a discussion in these comments).

We have always valued constructive criticism and feedback and will continue to make improvements to the site and services we offer to the benefit of our members and customers. I certainly appreciate the time you’ve spent to share your thoughts with us.

I complained to you about the gifting six months ago at least via email. I don’t know if you’ve fixed it. It doesn’t look like it.

You are only allowed to email your customers (i.e. me), not the people to whom I gift apps. I.e. you can legally send them an email with their application serial number and an INVITATION to become a member. And that’s it.

There’s nothing wrong with AppFresh and your policy has been wrong from the beginning. You’re just lucky the AppFresh crew are easy going Germans/Europeans. Another US based team would have launched a concerted protest at your policies across the whole Mac community. Compete on product performance and not on a monopoly position.

MacUpdate set itself up as a community resource, not a company who would destroy other applications to advance their own interests.

As you know, I’m certainly in the top 10% of your customers over the last four years or so so this criticism is coming from someone who knows your site and is an active purchaser of Mac applications.

We’ll agree to disagree on AppFresh, that’s fine. I invite you to compare AppFresh to MacUpdate once more and see which works better these days. For our purposes, we compared both against literally 2,000+ Mac apps (we do extensive testing for MacUpdate Desktop). If you only use a few major or popular apps, AppFresh may work just fine.

Can you clarify the two questions I asked you, vis-a-vis the exact law and where you some how got the idea that MacUpdate is logging all your apps?

I’ll search again for your email regarding the gifting, but perhaps it wasn’t sent directly to me? We’ll certainly be addressing that now that it’s been brought to my attention (just from a best practices perspective, which is to say that I agree with your sentiment on that).

As I mentioned before, I appreciate the constructive feedback that you’ve given us.

The reason it appears MacUpdate is logging all the apps is that I believe it requires a MacUpdate account. Are you saying that there is no record on your servers of a given installation of MacUpdate or serial number’s applications?

For the spamming, you have enough information. As a huge mass mailer, you owe it to yourselves and your clients to know the laws on unsolicited commercial email in the major jurisdictions you server.

MacUpdate Desktop requires a MacUpdate account/login because that’s how we determine your subscription is up-to-date and valid so you can use the app. MacUpdate Desktop accounts also have extra benefits on the Web site, and those are tied to the app (like Watch Lists). Just like MobileMe required a MobileMe account to use, or Dropbox requires a Dropbox account to use, or Mozy requires a Mozy account to use, or the iTunes Store requires an iTunes account (even to get free content).

This is pretty standard procedure. If you’re telling me the fact that MacUpdate Desktop requires an account led you to believe that we’re logging all this data about you, then I’m quite relieved as I don’t think that’s a misconception many people will make. To be clear: we have zero record of what apps you have on your Mac or their serial numbers (it’s impossible to scrape serial numbers from an app, anyway, nor do we have any reason to do this).

Your analogy is very good. I don’t use iTunes at all anymore on account of the multiple privacy violations iTunes entails (mixing your application data, with your phone data, with your music data, with your video data, with your financial data). It’s not like Dropbox which is just an account.

I’m not sure we should believe you about not tracking our application data, any more than I should have believed Apple when Apple denied tracking location information.

I’d be more comfortable with a serial number than a login to MacUpdate or some demonstration about what data is being sent out and how it is being handled and stored on your servers.

Thanks for taking the trouble to answer our questions in detail up until now.

I’ve had problems with MacUpdate as well. I tried to gift some software but without putting my recipients on mailing lists. Needless to say, MacUpdate spammed them all.

On top of that, quality used to curated at MacUpdate but these days they promote all kinds of scamware. Every once in the while, they do offer something high quality like Scrivener but lately it’s an exception rather than the rule.